


Hope County Blues: Little Whirlwinds

by PadaWinBaby



Series: Hope County Blues [1]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Brain Shit AU, Empathy, M/M, Mental influence, Telekinesis, Telepathy, The Deputy ain't even in the force folks, extremely ooc, ngl most side characters exist for the sole purpose of facilitating the Deputy's relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-27 15:00:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19015264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PadaWinBaby/pseuds/PadaWinBaby
Summary: Cinder Rook is tuned into the world's shittiest radio station 24/7: the minds of all of Hope County. It naturally comes as some surprise when the Seed clan moves in, and things are immediately different. Cinder is sucked into a world of unimaginable beauty, but also one of immense darkness, and finds himself relying on the strength of the minds he's connected with to keep him afloat a the chaos.





	Hope County Blues: Little Whirlwinds

Cinder Rook considered himself a simple man who enjoyed the relative quiet of the forest. He owned 300 acres of miraculously undisturbed woodland up the side of one of the Whitetail Mountains, and he only drove into Fall's End when absolutely necessary. Even for as small and isolated as the little village was, the press of so many minds was overwhelming.

You see, Cinder was a telepath, and had unwilling access to the every thought of anyone who got within a hundred feet of him, 24 hours a day. It was like being permanently tuned into the world's shittiest radio station. 

When he was young, there'd been doctors who thought that medicating him until he couldn't feel his face would help. All they did was turn him into a lump of clay who cried because the sky was the wrong shade of blue, and couldn't walk because he didn't live in the same zip code as his feet, so his parents had taken him off of them. He'd tried, thus far unsuccessfully, to shield his mind somehow. Resistance just made the voices louder. 

So Cinder smoked a lot more weed than was strictly healthy, and he lived as remotely as he could get away with. He had few friends, mostly because it was hard to trust people when you could hear exactly what they thought of you at all times. Sharky brought him weed, Hurk brought him beer, and Boomer didn't judge his choices. The sheriff would come up and check in with him from time to time, making sure he wasn't growing his own weed or brewing moonshine, though he'd never actually say that out loud. 

He lived a peaceful, undisturbed life until the Seed family came to Hope County.

~

The Seed family swept into Hope County like a tornado, stirring up gossip like windblown leaves. Cinder got his first impression of them from Hurk, who kept going over the fire-and-brimstone sermon Abraham Seed gave his first Sunday until Cinder had to ask him to leave. 

Abraham Seed was a fiery, charismatic preacher, who managed to work God and sin into every conversation. His wife, Rachel, was a quiet, cowed woman, who never spoke to or made eye contact with anyone, and wore clothes that covered her chin to toe, with long sleeves, even in the summer. The oldest boy, Jacob, was stoic, but apparently he had a wicked sense of humor, too, and his eyes sparkled with intelligence. The middle child, Joseph, was arrogant and manipulative, and parroted his father's sermons whenever the opportunity presented itself. The youngest, John, was soft-spoken, with a ready smile and a penchant for flirting with literally everyone. He had the bluest eyes Cinder had ever seen, and he'd never even seen the man in person. 

Most of the town's gossip seemed to center around the fact that the three boys were clearly in their 20's or 30's but still living at home, in spite of their wicked good looks. That didn't stop the girls in Fall's End from daydreaming about climbing Jacob, being dominated by Joseph, or getting absolutely railed by John. A lot of it was enough to make poor Cinder queasy, which was more than enough reason to avoid the church. Who could focus on all the reasons you were going to hell when you were party to the all the ways pretty little Julia Marks wanted Jacob to break her?  
Cinder was intrigued by the entire family, of course. They somehow managed to avoid running into him, and he could never pick their thoughts out of the noise when he was in town. They were different, and different deserved investigation, even if it would give him a headache. So he did something he rarely did. 

He sought them out. 

~

He got Jacob's location first, from Sharky. Apparently the redhead was former military, and liked to spend his time at the Veteran's Center, up the far side of the same mountain Cinder called home. Rumor had it he was organizing a therapy program that involved training service dogs for injured vets. It was an admirable cause, and it made Cinder warm in the chest. He knew PTSD. He'd lived through a traumatic childhood, and then relived others' traumas through their thoughts and memories for years.

Somewhere along the line, between picking the information from the chaos of Sharky's mind and getting horrifically high on some Northern Lights his friend had smuggled in from Colorado, Cinder made up his mind to meet the oldest Seed son. So that evening, after Sharky fell asleep in the guest house, Cinder packed a box with some old blankets and lit out for the Veteran's Center in his rusty old farm truck, lovingly named Valerie Mae. 

Cinder pulled up at the place with about two hours to spare before posted closing hours, but the place looked like it was already closed. There were one or two farm trucks parked in the lot, a few of which looked like they were trying to outdo Valerie Mae in their ratio of metal to filler. The lights were still on, though, so Cinder hopped out of the truck. The weed muffled the noise in his brain, but he could still hear the haunted whispers of traumatized minds as he gathered up his box of blankets and headed inside.

The Veteran's Center had always sort of been in rough shape. Hope County wasn't big enough for a proper VA presence, and without a VA hospital to support them, the Veteran's Center frequently found itself too low on funding to fix the things that broke. The overhead fluorescents in particular flickered ominously as Cinder entered reception and, with a forced smile at the girl behind the counter, continued on back to the laundry facility near the gym. 

The halls were silent enough that Cinder heard the squeak of sneakers and playful shouting before he saw the pickup game of basketball underway in the gym. He set his box down in the laundry and moved to get a better vantage point on the competition. He recognized Deputy Staci Pratt even without his uniform shirt, as well as Tommy Strange from the few times Cinder had braved going down to the library, and Sanford Ringwood, who still looked exactly like he had in high school except for the prosthetic leg he now sported. He didn't recognize the loud, intense redhead with the piercing blue eyes and what looked like burn scars on his face, arms, and what Cinder could see of his chest. That had to be Jacob. And _holy shit_ was he attractive. 

Jacob moved around the half court so expertly that it took Cinder a moment to notice the man was a double amputee. He was missing both legs below the knee, his right ending closer to the ankle and his left closer to the knee. His prosthetics were a matte black camo with a white cross-like symbol emblazoned on them. It was the same symbol Cinder kept seeing in people's thoughts when Abraham Seed was brought up. Cinder wondered if it was some kind of family crest.

He tore himself away from the game and started loading blankets into one of the bulk washers, humming to himself. The game ended behind him, and the players dispersed. Cinder knew exactly when each man hit the highway because their thoughts were suddenly muffled. He even knew when the receptionist left, locking the door so he could get out but not back in. 

He was confident that he was alone in the building, so it naturally came as a shock when, as he was walking down the hall to the men's room, he walked head-on into Jacob Seed coming out of the kitchen. Cinder reeled back, startled, and over balanced, falling on his ass in front of the beautiful man. 

"Shit, are you okay?" Jacob asked, squatting down in a way that had to have been uncomfortable in his prosthetics to offer Cinder a hand up. "I didn't realize anyone was still here."

"Neither did I," Cinder replied, voice sounding shaky even to his own ears. He squinted at Jacob for a moment. He hadn't heard him! He looked down at the proffered hand for a moment, almost skeptical, but took it anyway, and let Jacob pull him to his feet as if he weighed less than a feather. Which, that wasn't far from the truth.

The moment their hands touched, Cinder's brain flooded with colors and art that drowned out his thoughts and eased his constant headache. He saw wolves running through rainbow forests, children splashing happily in an opal pool. Even the darkness of war and pain was beautiful in the private landscape of Jacob's mind. 

"Who are you?" a soft voice asked, and a shape coalesced of colors and paint strokes before Cinder's consciousness. It was the vaguest suggestion of a redheaded young man, nearly lost in the impressionist jumble. 

"Cinder Ellis Rook," Cinder whispered into the colorful void. 

"Cinderella?" the shape asked, flooding the landscape with magic and music and ball gowns. Cinder couldn't help the reflexive snort and eye roll. 

"Technically. Mom loved her fairy tales. Clearly she wanted a girl," he admitted. His consciousness curled tighter around itself defensively, and Cinder dropped Jacob's hand. 

The sudden silence and flickering fluorescents were almost as painful as the usual chaos in Cinder's head, after the beauty he'd just witnessed. Jacob was looking at him strangely, blue eyes intense with curiosity and an edge of vulnerability that might be fear.

"You're a telepath," Jacob whispered, as if the silence were too thick to disturb with normal speech. Cinder nodded, staring at Jacob with wide hazel eyes. 

"What are you?" Cinder asked just as quietly. "I can't hear you, but when I touch you...your mind is beautiful." He wanted to take Jacob's hand again, to live in a world so full of color and light and magic forever. 

"My father calls us nephilim," Jacob replied, grimacing as if the word tasted bitter. "Children of the angels. I'm an empath." He looked down at the dark lines of the tattoos that curled around Cinder's fingers, as if he, too, wanted to take Cinder's hand again. "Your emotions are so close to the surface I feel like I could touch them, but they don't come to me when I call like they do with others'. I can't feel them unless I'm touching you." Jacob's impossibly blue eyes met his again. "I'd love to get to know you better, Cinder Rook. Would you have lunch with me tomorrow?"  
A spark of something went up Cinder's spine when Jacob said his name, and he realized he'd never said it out loud to him. An immense exhaustion settled into his bones at the thought of coming back to town two days in a row. "How about I cook something and we picnic up on my land, away from the potential headache of town?" Cinder suggested instead.

Jacob frowned, and for a terrible moment, Cinder wondered if he’d made a miscalculation. Then Jacob’s big hand raised to smooth the wrinkle of stress from Cinder’s forehead, pushing a long strand of Cinder’s dark hair away from his eyes. The brief moment of contact lit up Cinder’s world again, relief spreading through him like a cool breeze.

“You have no shielding to speak of, do you?” Jacob asked softly, the sound nearly lost in the rush of euphoria Cinder was currently at the mercy of. 

It was all Cinder could do to shake his head no, the movement breaking their contact again. Jacob’s face went soft around the edges.

“I can’t imagine what that headache must feel like,” the redhead whispered. Cinder turned his face away finally. The ugliness of his personal trauma was beginning to rear its head, and he didn’t want Jacob to see it. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jacob visibly waver between wanting to comfort him again and leaving him alone.

Without looking at him this time, Cinder floated the offer to Jacob again, letting his gaze stray back towards the laundry room, where his load of blankets for donation would be finished drying soon. He wished he could hear Jacob’s thoughts, to know if he was believing this façade of preoccupation or not.

“Yeah. Yes. Let’s picnic at your place,” Jacob said finally, his voice still soft in the silence of the Veteran’s Center, but firm. Another spark of something went up Cinder’s spine as he imagined what Jacob might have been like in the Service. He pushed that thought down with a swiftness, thankful that Jacob couldn’t read him just then.

Cinder reached up and rubbed the back of his neck, idly combing out the short hairs at the nape of his neck. "Uh, okay, so, I live up the only road off the highway on the south face of the mountain," Cinder explained. "Here, let me give you my number...." He fumbled around in his pockets until he realized he hadn't brought anything with him, and then he gestured for Jacob to follow him to the reception desk. He hastily scrawled his name and phone number on the back of one of the Center's business cards and handed it to the big redhead. Jacob gave him a soft smile as he tucked it into the breast pocket of the flannel he had on over his tank top. 

He didn't walk away like Cinder expected him to, and Cinder frantically tried to come up with something else to say. He'd just opened his mouth to ask him if he smoked weed when the buzzer on the dryer went off. Cinder flushed slightly and ducked away to fold the fresh blankets and stow them in the donation box. 

When he came back, Jacob was gone. Cinder let out a long breath and headed back out to Valerie Mae, climbing up into driver's seat with a feeling in his chest like he was maybe not as connected to his body as he would've liked. Had he hallucinated that whole exchange?


End file.
